On 16 January 2018, Dr Jayme Reaves (Public theologian, Dorset) and Professor David Tombs (University of Otago) delivered the joint paper “#MeToo Jesus: Why Naming Jesus as a Victim of Sexual Abuse Matters”, a Shiloh Project lecture at the University of Sheffield.

The #MeToo hashtag and campaign created by Tarana Burke in 2007 and popularized by Alyssa Milano in October 2017 has confirmed what feminists have long argued on the prevalence of sexual assault, sexual harassment and sexually abusive behaviour. It has also prompted a more public debate on dynamics of victim blaming and victim shaming which contribute to the silences which typically benefit perpetrators and add a further burden to survivors. As such, the #MeToo movement raises important questions for Christian faith and theology. A church in New York offered a creative response in a sign which adapted Jesus’ words ‘You did this to me’ in Mt 25:40 to read ‘You did this to #MeToo’. This presentation will explore the biblical and theological reasons for naming Jesus as a victim of sexual abuse drawing on earlier work presenting crucifixion as a form of state terror and sexual abuse (Tombs 1999). It will then discuss some of the obstacles to this recognition and suggest why the acknowledgement nonetheless matters. It will argue that recognition of Jesus as victim of sexual abuse can help strengthen church responses to sexual abuses and challenge tendencies within the churches, as well as in wider society, to collude with victim blaming or shaming.

On April 3, 2017, Professor Dana Nolan Fewell (Drew University) delivered a lecture on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19, and its reception in “Bible-Thumping, Bible-Tweeting Culture”. The lecture was held at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Associate Professor Johanna Stiebert (University of Leeds) explores sex between brothers and sisters in “Exploring Connections between Rape Culture and the Hebrew Bible: Brother and Sister and Sex in Biblical Text and Popular Culture”, a paper delivered at the University of Chester on June 1, 2016.

Associate Professor Stiebert is the author of First-Degree Incest and the Hebrew Bible: Sex in the Family (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), which deals in more detail with the same topic.

Professor Amy-Jill Levine (Vanderbilt Divinity School) delivered the 42nd Annual Antoinette Brown lecture on March 31, 2016, at Benton Chapel, Vanderbilt University Divinity School. The lecture also celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality.

Levine’s lecture was entitled “The Carpenter, Gender, and Sexuality: The Use and Abuse of the Gospels in Politics and Piety”. Her lecture looks at what the Bible teaches about rape, adultery, and women’s sexual pleasure. She also discusses the contemporary deployment of the Bible as a weapon: contemporary interpretations of the Bible which result in people dying, such as condemnations of homosexuality and abortion, and domestic abuse. Lastly, she examines the roles and authority of women in the Bible.

Although biblical texts identify a range of sexual behavior as illicit, adultery is the only sexual act addressed in the law collections as a crime. Some scholars have argued that the treatment of adultery in biblical law is better and more favorable toward women than that found in the cuneiform law collections; others have argued precisely the opposite. What is more likely is that biblical law is largely in keeping with how ancient Near Eastern societies other than Israel and Judah handled adultery and should not necessarily be evaluated as either better or worse from a modern perspective.

Professor Jennifer Wright Knust (Boston University) has delivered various talks related to her book, Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions About Sex and Desire (2011). Three of these are available on YouTube and Vimeo:

Professor David Carr (Union Theological Seminary) provides a 31-minute video lecture on the topic of Sex in the Bible: “Sexuality and the Bible” (February 6, 2015).

31 minutes to get a birds-eye overview of the Old Testament and New Testament views on sex, based on David M. Carr’s book, The Erotic Word: Sexuality, Spirituality and the Bible (Oxford University Press, 2003). See also his more recent, Holy Resilience: The Bible’s Traumatic Origins (Yale University Press, 2014).

In an event organized by Swissnex San Francisco, Thomas Römer, Sarah Shectman, Konrad Schmid, and Steven McKenzie discussed views on homosexuality and sexuality in the Bible and ancient Near Eastern texts. Sexuality and the Bible: What the Texts Really Say was held on November 17, 2011 at Swissnexx San Francisco, and the video is available on Daily Motion.

What does the Bible tell us of the roles of men and women in ancient society and about the importance of gender? From a literary standpoint, do the texts necessarily condemn or condone certain behaviors and lifestyles? In conjunction with the Annual Conference of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature, swissnex San Francisco invites top scholars to discuss the role of sexuality in the Bible and answer some of these questions.

The evening features Thomas Römer, Professor of Hebrew Bible at the Faculty of Theology and History of Religions at the University of Lausanne. His book L’homosexualité dans le Proche Orient ancien et la Bible (Homosexuality in the Ancient Orient), focuses on the Bible as a historical source for analyzing how ancient societies viewed relations between men.

Konrad Schmid, Professor of Old Testament and Early Judaism at the University of Zurich and author of Genesis and the Moses Story: Israel’s Dual Origins in the Hebrew Bible (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2010), presents the Paradise Story in Genesis 2-3 and its view of sexuality and immortality. And Sarah Shectman, author of Women in the Pentateuch: A Feminist and Source-Critical Analysis (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009), looks at the varied attitudes toward women’s sexuality in different parts of the Bible, such as the laws in the Pentateuch that treat women’s sexuality as a possession, belonging either to a father or husband, versus the freer view in the Song of Songs where the protagonist appears more in control of her own body. Steven McKenzie moderates the discussion.

A day conference at St Matthew’s Westminster on January 25, 2014 examined the concept of marriage in biblical and historical perspective. The conference was organized by Affirming Catholicism. The audio of each talk at the conference is available on YouTube.

Marriage has been much in the news recently. Some are adamant that the Christian ideal of marriage is and can only be between one man and one woman, providing the proper context in which children are conceived and raised. Others understand deep committed relationships to be God-given and marriage-like, regardless of whether they are between a man and a woman, two women, or two men.

Our conference held on Saturday 25 January 2014 at St Matthew’s House Westminster offered an opportunity to consider how marriage is presented in Scripture and how it has been framed through Christian history, and to explore the Church of England’s current position on marriage and same-sex relationships.

Videos of Thomas Römer’s 2013 seminars at the Collège de France, entitled The Human Condition: The Ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible, are available at the Collège’s website, or for download at the links provided below (800mb+). The seminars have been overdubbed by an English translator.

Thomas Römer is Professor of Old Testament at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) and the Collège de France, and author of many works, including Israels Väter (1990) on the Patriarchal traditions in the Pentateuch.

In these seminars, Römer discusses the question of the human condition, drawing on ancient Near Eastern texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and, especially, on biblical texts.

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